Kathy Engel
Associate Arts Professor
Kathy Engel is a poet, essayist, teacher, organizer, and cultural worker. Her newest book of poems, Dear Inheritors, was released in June, 2024 from Get Fresh Books. Previous books include Ruth’s Skirts; the anthology We Begin Here: Poems for Palestine and Lebanon, co-edited with Kamal Boullata; The Kitchen accompanying the art of German Perez; the chapbook, Banish The Tentative, and The Lost Brother Alphabet, 2020. An excerpt from one of her poems appeared as graffiti in artist Jenny Holzer’s 2024 exhibition at The Guggenheim while two stanza’s were projected outside onto the museum wall alongside work by Mahmoud Darwish, Seamus Heaney, Anne Carson, Yehuda Amichai and others. A collaboration with artist Ellen Driscoll, Eyechart, launched in 2022 as installation, book, and digitally. The video, Whowillkneelforyou, a choral reading of her poem “To Kneel” was released in 2018 on The Root.
In 1983, with a group of women she founded and was first director of the international women’s human rights group, MADRE, following the performance piece she co-produced, talking Nicaragua. She was co-founder and former president of Riptide Communications whose media campaigns included breaking the story of the exoneration of Alger Hiss and the FBI’s spying on Central America solidarity groups. Engel has co-founded, produced and consulted for numerous projects including East End Women in Black, Poets for Ayiti, The Correctional Association/Women in Prison Project, Lyrical Democracies, The Hayground School (for which she conceptualized and co- produced the one time dramatic dialogue Who’s Gonna Be There featuring the actors Danny Glover and Roy Scheider. In 2002, on behalf of the Center for Community Change, she conceptualized and produced the performance piece, Stand with Sisters for Economic Dignity for which women who’d lived with economic assistance performed their stories in a Senate Office in Washington, D.C., to bring attention to the Welfare Reauthorization vote. She is Associate Arts Professor in the Department of Art & Public Policy, Tisch School of the Arts, NYU.